I was an unlikely emissary to our mother. She missed her darling Ned, often taking to the settee like a scorned lover; if not napping, reading sentimental novels with preposterous plots full of flushed cheeks wet with tears and an excess of exclamation marks. I wanted her to revel, as I did, in our new life, and felt sure, given time, that I could replace Ned in her affections, have some piece of her for myself. The ball might be the very thing to unite us. Our luck turned when spring showed its first tender buds. She had a letter from Ned saying he meant to be home for Whit week, which lifted her spirits considerably.

“Did he write anything of Henry?” I asked.

“Why should you worry about Henry? I’m his mother.”

And so I let my younger brother slip from my mind. It seemed enough that dresses had been made and fitted just right. Mama had her one good necklace repaired, let Everina practice curling her hair, even giggled when her old silk shoes, recruited from a trunk, still fit her.

But there was no escaping Whitsuntide and the truth of our life.

Two weeks before, Henry appeared on our doorstep with his sorry bag of clothes and a letter from the schoolmaster explaining that he’d been deemed “unteachable.” Mama refused to look at him, except to ask after Ned, who’d stopped writing home altogether. I took Henry under my wing, buttered his toast on both sides, the way he liked it, and tried to shield him from Father, who took his ejection from school as an affront to our family’s “good name.” He turned back to hard drinking, a tonic for his own self-loathing, and came home in the wee hours so drunk he couldn’t even climb the stairs. During the day he raged at whoever was in his path, Henry most of all.

Often sick to my stomach, I excused myself from John Arden’s lectures to rush home and steal Henry away to the haven of my favorite oak on the Common, where we were both soothed by my reading to him, even if he hummed while I did. One day I shut the book hard and glared at him while he let a woolly caterpillar inch toward his wrist. He was trying to feed it a leaf.

“Why aren’t you listening, Henry? You never listen.”

“Polygonia c-album, that’s its real name. Just a baby, this one, and he likes the undersides of leaves, but when he grows up, he’ll like the top side.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, my irritation waning.

“I learned it. At school. And their favorite food is hops, but they like stinging nettles too. And some day it will be a butterfly, and fly away.”

Despite my impatience, I was struck by his gentleness, his awe of the natural world.

“I’m sorry, Henry, that Father hurts you.”